On Shelley’s arrival in
London, one of the few persons with whom he was intimate was Leigh
Hunt. His acquaintance with him commenced, I believe, in 1813, and it now
ripened into the closest intimacy. It was indeed an epoch in his life. Leigh
Hunt was at that time joint editor of the far-famed Examiner, and which made him in the eyes of Lord Byron (but more so in those of his future biographer,
Mr. Moore, who always had the hell of reviews
before him,) a person of some consequence and weight in the literary world.

I have been furnished by a lady,
who, better even than Leigh Hunt, knew Keats, with the means of supplying many interesting
particulars respecting him; so well indeed did she know him, that she might have furnished
materials for that life of him promised by Mr.
Brown, who unfortu-

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nately died in New Zealand before it was
completed, and where Keats’s MSS. and papers are said to have
been lost. Keats was left fatherless at an early age, and when he came
to years of discretion, was apprenticed to an apothecary, but the sight of suffering
humanity, and the anatomical school, soon disgusted him with the pursuit, and he abandoned
the profession of medicine, but not originally to follow the ill-named flowery paths of
poetry; for an authentic anecdote is told of him, corroborative of this remark. One day,
sitting dreamily over his desk, he was endeavouring to while away a tedious hour by copying
some verses from memory; one of his brother apprentices looking over his shoulder, said,
“Keats, what are you a poet?” It is added,
he was much piqued at the accusation, and replied, “Poet
indeed! I never composed a line in my life.” The same story is told of
Walter Scott, who in crossing over one of the Scotch
lakes, endeavoured to put his ideas into verse, but on landing had only made two bad
rhymes, and observed to

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the friend who accompanied him, “I
shall never do for a poet.” But Keats, no less than the
Wizard of the North, falsified his own prophecy. Keats was ever a
constant reader of Shakspeare, and I have before me
a folio edition of the great dramatist’s works, with notes and comments on Troilus and Cressida, and containing at
the end of the volume an ode, evidently a very early attempt, which, properly for his fame,
he did not publish. He might also have forborne giving to the world some other of the short
poems, his first attempts in the art. We are certainly indebted for the discovery of the
poetic vein in him to Leigh Hunt, and his encouragement of his young
friend. But it is equally owing to Leigh Hunt that the disciple
enrolled himself in what has been termed the Cockney school, and fell into a pale imitation
of the Elizabethan writers, and the adoption of a language, neither Shakspearean nor
Spencerian—a language neither belonging to
his own time, nor to society. How well does Quintilian
designate some author of his day

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who had a similar mania!
“Sepultam scribendi artem suscitat, obliteratas restituit
literas, antiquos renovat apices, abrogatas recudit literarum formulas, et ingens
opus, rei literaricæ miraculum quod stupeat, &c.” Thus, in
the words of Dr. Johnson, speaking of two of his
contemporaries, he “affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival, and
thought his language more poetical, as it was more removed from common use.”
Such was the prevailing fault of Endymion, an unreadable poem, only redeemed by the Hymn to
Pan, and a few scattered passages, Oases in the misty desert of an outworn
mythology. Shelley told me that he and
Keats had mutually agreed, in the same given time, (six months
each,) to write a long poem, and that the Endymion, and Revolt of Islam were the fruits of this
rivalry. But I shall have much to say on the subject of these poems, in the course of these
memoirs; and with this introduction of the reader to Keats, let me
turn to Shelley, and his eventful history.

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After living some time under Leigh
Hunt’s roof, in the spring of 1817, Shelley took a house at Marlow, and there passed nearly a year. His choice
of Buckinghamshire, and of this town, as an abode, was chiefly owing to its being at an
easy distance from London, and on the banks of his favorite river the Thames. Here it was,
that in addition to Prince Athanase,
some minor lyrics, and part of Rosalind and
Helen, he composed “The Revolt
of Islam,” and wrote a pamphlet, now lost, on the occasion of the
Princess Charlotte’s death, entitled,
“The Hermit of Marlow.” In the spring of 1835, I
made an excursion to Marlow, in order to visit scenes, that were among the sources of
inspiration of Laon and Cythna, as the first edition of The Revolt of Islam was entitled. The house he inhabited was
pointed out to me, by almost the first person, a middle-aged man, of whom I enquired. It
was in a retired street, and commanded no view—a comfortable abode, with gothic
windows, and behind it a garden and shady

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orchard plot, of some
extent, carpeted with the greenest turf, which must have afforded a delightful retreat in
the summer noon. Not only the town itself, with its church and bridge, and old buildings,
is highly picturesque, but the environs are strikingly beautiful, and remarkable for their
fine country seats; Daney, so called from a Danish camp having once existed here, whose
entrenchment may still be traced,—Hanneker, built by Inigo Jones, and many other noble residences, inhabited by families of
wealth and distinction, diversify the landscapes, and make them an enchantment. Nor must I
forget the fall of the river, over an artificial embankment immediately above the town,
where the eye crossing the richest meadows, rests on the lovely beech groves of Bisham
Abbey. “In no place are riches and poverty presented in more prominent contrast.
Lace-making is the occupation of the poor, women being the operatives, who lose their
health by sedentary labour, for which they are badly paid. The poor-laws ground to the
dust

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those who had just risen above pauperage, and were obliged to
pay them. The changes produced by peace following a long war, were heavily felt; the
trade which had been their support, flowing into other channels, produced great
destitution and misery, which a bad harvest contributed to enhance.”
Shelley had a very early sympathy for the working classes. I
remember the very harrowing effect which Southey’sDon
Espriello’s Letters produced on him in 1810 or 1811; one of the most
frightful, faithful pictures ever drawn of the wretchedness, vice, and immorality that seem
necessary concomitants of an overproduction of manufactures. The impression this feelingly
written work made on Shelley, was ineffaceable, and gave rise to the
apostrophe in Queen Mab,—

“Commerce! beneath whose poison-breathing shade

No solitary virtue dares to spring,

But poverty and wealth with equal hand

Scatter their withering curses, and unfold

The doors of premature and violent death,

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To pining famine, and full-fed disease,

To all that shares the lot of human life,

Which poisoned body and soul scarce drags the chain

That lengthens as it goes, and clanks behind.”

And again:

“His host of blind and unresisting dupes

The despot numbers, from his cabinet

These puppets of his schemes he moves at will,

Even as the slaves by force or famine driven,

Beneath a vulgar master, to perform

A task of cold and brutal drudgery—

Hardened to hope—insensible to fear—

Scarce living pulleys of a dead machine,

Mere wheels of work and articles of trade.”

In a note appended to these passages, penned with all that sincerity and
conviction of truth, that uncompromising spirit that characterises all his writings, a note
in which he deprecates the luxury of the rich, calling it “a remedy that
aggravates, while it pollutes the countless divisions of society,” he adds
that “the poor are set to labour—for what? Not for the food for which

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they famish—not for the blankets for want of which their
babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels—not those comforts of
civilization, without which, civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest
savage, oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting
prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him. No! for the
pride of power—for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of
the hundredth part of society.”

In this town of Marlow, he had an opportunity, not of visiting quite such
loathsome dens as described in these “Letters of a Spaniard,” where the factory
lords stifle their victims in the great hotbeds of crime and pollution, Manchester and
Leeds,—but he saw enough to shock and disgust him. He did all in his power to
alleviate the condition of the poor lace-makers of Marlow; “he visited them in
their damp and fireless abodes—he supplied them with blankets and coals and food
and medicines, and from tending one of

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the sick, caught the
opthalmia, which nearly deprived him of sight.”

These facts I had confirmed by a lady still resident there, one of its
great ornaments, who did ample justice to Shelley’s memory, and related many individual anecdotes of his
benevolence and charity, that called for her warmest sympathy and admiration. I may add,
that his name is still perpetuated among the inhabitants, who are proud of having harboured
the poet, and counted him among their number. I was surprised indeed, considering the low
and disgraceful state of education in England, to find that any of them were acquainted
with his works, and hailed the circumstance as a pledge of his immortality,—and an
immortal work is the Revolt of Islam.

He had originally, it would seem, after the Divine Comedy, intended to have written it in terza rima,
of which he made an experiment in Prince
Athanase; but soon after abandoned that metre, as too monotonous and artificial,
and

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adopted instead the stanza of Spencer, which he wields as none have ever done before him. The fragment of
Prince Athanase is valuable, as the first conception of a
great picture by a great master. In this sketch of the prince, we find the germs of the
character of Laon. Athanase is a youth nourished in dreams of liberty, animated by a
resolution to confer the boons of civil and religious liberty on his fellow men; and the
poet doubtless meant to have created for him a companion endued with the same enthusiasm.

A lovelier creature than Cythna, heart
never conceived—a purer love than those of Laon
and Cythna words could not express. The story I shall
not analyse—it is indeed treated with the simplicity of Grecian art, and might have
furnished Canova or Thorwalsden with a subject for a series of bas
reliefs.

This poem occupied six months. It was composed as he floated in his skiff
on the Thames, reclined beneath its willow and alder fringed banks, or took refuge from the
noonday solsti-

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cian heats, in some island only the haunt of the swan. A
Marlow gentleman told me, Shelley spent frequently
whole nights in his boat, taking up his occasional abode at a small inn down the river,
which I imagine must have been at Cookham. We find everywhere scattered about this poem,
strikingly faithful drawings of the scenery near and about Marlow; and with the Revolt of Islam in my hand, I for nearly a
month, traversed the stream up and down, from the sequestered and solemn solitudes of the
deep woods of Clifden, on the one hand, to the open sunniness of the enamelled meadows of
Henley on the other, and often fancied myself in the very spots so graphically drawn. The
opening in that most graceful dedication,—

proves that he had been passing this summer in great isolation from his family, and is
a tribute to the virtues of one of the noblest-minded of

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307

her
sex,—“a child of glorious parents,” as he styles her, and
inheriting much of the talent of both, which has gained for her a name, reflecting honour
on either.

The life which Shelley led at
Marlow, occasionally varied by short trips to London, was, as far as the society of the
place was concerned, a most isolated one. Among his principal amusements, were boating and
pistol practice, and it was complained that he “frightened the place from its
propriety;” and one of his neighbours pretended that she was afraid of going
out for fear of being shot; no doubt a very false alarm. Among his visitors may be
mentioned, Mr. Peacock, and his old college friend,
Mr. Hogg; to the latter of whom we are indebted
for filling up so important a chasm in Shelley’s history, his
Oxonian career,—materials, of which I have largely availed myself. The first of these
gentlemen has not had the reputation to which Nightmare Abbey, and his other novels, justly
entitled him. “They were too good for his age,”

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as
Byron said. But there is a work of Mr.
Peacock’s, to which a more glaring injustice has been done,—I
allude to Rododendron. The first
time I met with that exquisite poem, was at Paris, where I saw it lying on a lady’s
table. She told me it was her favourite poem, and that she read it several times every
year, and with increased pleasure.

It is something to have contributed to the happiness of one human being.
Shelley agreed with her as to the merits of
Rododendron, for he
says,—“It is a book from which I confess, I expected extraordinary
success.” But although containing passages that throw into shade all that
Rogers and Campbell in their cold and stilted Didactics have produced, it fell dead
from the press. Let the author console himself in this age of reviews and coteries, with
the reflection, that the Epipsychidion met afterwards with a similar fate,—that it rose from its
ashes, and that his may yet do so; if it should not, I hope that in the island where
Ariosto places all the

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309

lost
treasures of earth, may be preserved among those neglected works, which have like straws
been swept down the current of time, for the recreation of “the Translated” Rododendron.

In six months of this year, to write and correct the press of such a work
as Laon and Cythna, was no slight task;
perhaps the mental excitement gave a diversion to his thoughts, and it must have required a
rare power of self-condensation and abstraction, to have enabled him to write under the
different afflictions that beset him. The publicity of the proceedings in Chancery, coupled
with the death of his wife, raised a host of detractors against him; Queen Mab was universally decried, his children made over
to strangers—and to crown all, his health in a very precarious state. He had formed
an idea that the situation of his house at Marlow was an insalubrious one—that a warm
climate was absolutely essential to him; and this, and various other reasons, among which,
the conviction that the breach between himself

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and his relations was
irreparable, weighing more than all the rest—induced him to come to a resolution of
quitting England, with scarcely a hope of revisiting it.

Thomas Campbell (1777-1844)
Scottish poet and man of letters; author of The Pleasures of Hope
(1799), Gertrude of Wyoming (1808) and lyric odes. He edited the New Monthly Magazine (1821-30).

Antonio Canova (1757-1822)
Italian neoclassical sculptor who worked at Rome.

Princess Charlotte Augusta (1796-1817)
The only child of George IV; she married Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg in 1816 and died
in childbirth the following year.

Thomas Jefferson Hogg (1792-1862)
English barrister and man of letters; after befriending Shelley at Oxford and being
expelled with him he pursued a legal career in London, publishing his Life of Shelley in 1858.

James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
English poet, journalist, and man of letters; editor of The
Examiner and The Liberal; friend of Byron, Keats, and
Shelley.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
English man of letters, among many other works he edited A Dictionary
of the English Language (1755) and Shakespeare (1765), and wrote Lives of the Poets (1779-81).

Inigo Jones (1573-1652)
English architect who collaborated with Ben Jonson on court masques and
entertainments.

John Keats (1795-1821)
English poet, author of Endymion, "The Eve of St. Agnes," and
other poems, who died of tuberculosis in Rome.

Thomas Moore (1779-1852)
Irish poet and biographer, author of the Irish Melodies (1807-34),
The Fudge Family in Paris (1818), and Lalla
Rookh (1817); he was Byron's close friend and designated biographer.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley [née Godwin] (1797-1851)
English novelist, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecaft, and the second wife
of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is the author of Frankenstein (1818)
and The Last Man (1835) and the editor of Shelley's works
(1839-40).

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
English poet, with Byron in Switzerland in 1816; author of Queen
Mab (1813), The Revolt of Islam (1817), The Cenci and Prometheus Unbound (1820), and Adonais (1821).

Robert Southey (1774-1843)
Poet laureate and man of letters whose contemporary reputation depended upon his prose
works, among them the Life of Nelson, 2 vols (1813), History of the Peninsular War, 3 vols (1823-32) and The Doctor, 7 vols (1834-47).